Poetry off the Shelf: Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal (2016), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Granta, The Nation, New England Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Sinclair has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was a longlisted finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award. In 2015, Sinclair was awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
Sinclair received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Cosponsored with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Writing Program